In the practice of borehole or wellbore drilling, a rotary drilling apparatus is employed to drill a hole downwardly into the ground, normally to either determine subsurface conditions, obtain samples of subsurface materials, or to extract natural resources located at depth. It is known to inject specialized cementitious material into the borehole to stabilize the hole walls or allow for isolation of certain subsurface strata.
Various cementing tools and methods have been developed over the years, often for mining or oil and gas drilling applications. While they have achieved generally widespread use and acceptance, it is known that certain drilling tools manifest potentially disadvantageous features. For example, some drilling tools are intended for deployment at a certain depth in the borehole, but locking them in place at that desired depth and then attempting to recover the string or stem used to place the tool may require rotation of the tool and/or the string or stem, with the risk that threaded sections of drill pipe—in which the tool is being deployed—may be loosened at depth, a potentially serious occurrence. Also, some cementing tools can only be positioned when the drill string has first been removed from the hole, a practice known as tripping out the drill string. Tripping out the drill string can be time consuming and, in some contexts, otherwise unnecessary or undesirable.
It would therefore be desirable to have a wellbore cementing tool that could be employed without tripping out the drill string or requiring rotation that might destabilize the string in place.